Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many computing devices are initialized using disk or memory images. A disk image includes one or more files that together hold the contents and structure of part or all of a data storage device, such as a hard drive, an optical disk, or a flash drive. A memory image includes one or more files that together hold the contents and structure of part or all of a computer memory, such as a random access memory (RAM). Typically, disc or memory images are created by creating a “snapshot” or page-by-page copy of RAM or a sector-by-sector copy of a disc or other drive. Thus, the disk or memory image can be an exact copy of the structure and contents of a storage device or memory independent of a file or memory system used to store files on the data storage device. Depending on the image format, a disk or memory image may span one or more computer files.
One example disk or memory image is a boot image which includes the software and related data to allow a device to be powered up; i.e., be booted. For example, a boot image for an application runtime is created by taking a snapshot of RAM storing the application and saving the snapshot to one or more files representing the boot image. The boot image can then later be loaded, perhaps using a single memory mapping command provided on several modern computing systems.